The real state of the union




Michael Ramirez

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A moldy oldie review: The Singlepoint sight

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"I don't know just what it is, but I'll let you have it cheap." So said the fellow at the gun show, and that is how I came to have this thing in my collection. The Singlepoint is an ancestor of today's red dot sights. It created a stir back in the seventies. It was discussed in the English  Parliament . Its moment of fame came on the Son Tay  raid in the Vietnam war. It even got writeups in  Popular Mechanics  and  Popular Science , honors reserved for things that were maximally cool. By modern standards, though, it's a pathetic gunsight. It was a good try for its time, no doubt. It is an occluded eye gunsight (OEG), meaning you can't see through it. When you look in the end you see a black field with a red dot floating in it. You look at the target with your other eye and your brain merges the two images into one. Thus, you see the red dot superimposed upon the target. Well, sort of. It doesn't work perfectly. The effects of  pho
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Classic gun review: First generation Thompson Center Contender

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Including a pictorial on how to change barrels The Contender is a break action single shot. You can set up the gun as a pistol or carbine, depending on your tastes. Barrels are interchangeable and available in many calibers. The gun reviewed is an older model, made in the seventies. There is a more recent "G2" second generation model with numerous changes to the mechanism. In between the early model shown and the present G2, there were several variations in parts and design, most significantly a redesign of the barrel latch to make the gun easier to open. The review gun lacks the easy-open feature. More about that later. The Contender figured in a  Supreme Court case , which established that having a pistol and parts to convert it to a rifle did not amount to possession of an illegal short barreled rifle. Thus in a small way the Contender has a place in gun rights history. Of course, it is still illegal to assemble the pistol barrel to a receiver which is at the
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Where to get the manual for your Browning Double Auto shotgun

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The owner's booklet is online as a PDF file. Randy Wakeman posted it several years ago, but I did not find out about it at the time. I came across it this evening while searching for something else. The factory instructions are exceedingly hard to find in printed form. The PDF of the original manual: http://randywakeman.com/BrowningDoubleAutoManual.pdf Browning's Double Auto shotgun is a great favorite of mine, perhaps because it is a so bizarre: two shots (one plus one capacity), semi-automatic. There is no magazine tube. The second shell is held on the lifter. The gun will serve all the roles of a double barrel gun and is sleeker and handier. It makes sense to me, but it didn't to a lot of people. It was never one of Browning's good sellers and the design was shelved more than 40 years ago. The gun is light, responsive, well balanced, swings easily. It might have been a big success if Sporting Clays had existed back when the gun was being made. It's ju
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